Iran’s internal power struggle

Published in the Jerusalem Post, 14 July 2026

 Ever since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran has been an autocratic theocracy, ruled with an iron fist by the supreme leader – first Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini until his death in 1989, and then Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, until he was killed on February 28, 2026 in an airstrike.

 Today’s Iran is no longer what it has been.  What it has become is the subject of controversial interpretations.

 Some believe that Iran is no longer a republic of any kind but has morphed into a dictatorial, mafia-style oligarchy in military uniform.  The IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), they maintain, exercises total control over political, economic and strategic decisions, whilst maintaining a theocratic veneer for the purposes of internal and international legitimacy.

They believe the new supreme leader, Motjaba Khamenei, is a puppet of the IRGC, selected under direct military pressure which bypassed the constitutional process. The new Khamenei certainly lacks religious credentials and public legitimacy, and has yet to demonstrate any independent authority.

         Real power, they say, resides in three IRGC hardliners: IRGC Commander‑in‑Chief Ahmad Vahidi; Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr; and senior military adviser to Khamenei Mohsen Rezaei.  All three rejected the renewed negotiations with the US and want to continue the war.

       They are only too aware that Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s president since July 2024, wants a ceasefire, and they act systematically to thwart him.  The IRGC has blocked his ministerial appointments and countered his signals of de-escalation.

On July 6 some source of power within the regime authorized Iranian forces to attack three commercial vessels near the Strait of Hormuz, well aware that this would prompt a US reaction.  In response US Central Command struck more than 80 Iranian military targets.  

This supports those who maintain that Iran is governed today by an IRGC which functions simultaneously as an armed force, an economic empire, an intelligence service, a political party and the effective government.

Yet, while many expert commentators do believe that the IRGC has reached a level of power never previously achieved, others are convinced that the internal struggle for dominance is not over and that the IRGC still has to consolidate the level of control it has acquired. They hold that power in Iran today is heavily contested between the IRGC and a more pragmatic political‑diplomatic camp, while the newly elected supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, sits above them as an ambivalent, vulnerable arbiter whose authority is real in law, but fragile in practice.  

On the evening of June 30, Iran’s state news TV channel was broadcasting a pre-recorded interview with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator in the ongoing talks with the US over sanctions relief, nuclear constraints and regional de‑escalation. 

Having confirmed that there are “behind‑the‑scenes negotiations” with Washington leading to a possible deal on limiting Iran’s nuclear activity, Ghalibaf was in the middle of a sentence when the screen went blank.  After a second or two, an old speech by Ali Khamenei, the former supreme leader, was on the air.

 Iranian hardliners had succeeded in cutting off a television interview with the country’s chief peace negotiator, as he was defending the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

In reporting the incident, the UK’s Daily Telegraph said that the censored sections included Ghalibaf’s response to reports that international inspectors would be allowed to visit Iran’s nuclear sites, his account of how frozen Iranian assets would be released, and details of the agreement’s proposed $300bn fund for post-war reconstruction.

Most importantly, Ghalibaf was about to discuss the new supreme leader’s equivocal message about the deal with the US, in which he had remarked that “in principle I had a different opinion” but had nonetheless authorized the agreement.  Hardliners had seized upon the remark as proof that the supreme leader was basically opposed to the negotiations that his own government was pursuing, even though he had given his approval to do so.

The television blackout prompted Parliament’s media center to issue a rare public protest, accusing state TV of violating normal protocol.  This led to a public debate about who controls the airwaves.  

Vahid Jalili, deputy chief at Iran’s state broadcaster, is the brother of Saeed Jalili, a former negotiator aligned with the Paydari Front, Iran’s most uncompromising conservative bloc, which opposes talks with the country that killed the former supreme leader.  For the Paydari Front and its allies, resistance to the US is the ideological core of the revolution.  

The Ghalibaf TV incident was not the first of its kind.  Just ten days previously, on the evening of June 20, Mahmoud Nabavian, a cleric and former member of Iran’s negotiating team, had gone on the air to allege that in agreeing to the US-Iran MoU,  the Iranian negotiating team had gone way beyond their brief,  and that the terms they had agreed to did not reflect the conditions that the supreme leader had previously set.

In a television interview, he began reading out what he claimed was classified correspondence from the supreme leader.  He claimed Khamenei had written to the negotiating team saying: “What was agreed upon in the Pakistan talks is completely different from what was supposed to happen, and was a condition for the legitimacy of the talks, and the talks must be stopped.”

The TV broadcast was cut off abruptly, and soon afterwards the public relations office of the news network announced that it "accepts the resignation of the relevant director general of the network" and would charge him with "negligence in professional management."

Commentators said Nabavian could not have gained access to the supreme leader’s letters without the complicity of a hardline source.

So what is the true situation within Iran? Evidence from reports in Iranian and international media points to a multi‑layered contest for supremacy being waged within the upper echelons of Iran’s governance.  

Many believe that Iran is currently operating with four overlapping centers of authority: the supreme leader, the IRGC, the president, and senior IRGC-aligned political figures – and that each is vying for supreme power.​  All, however, are probably united behind Khamenei's pledge to avenge his father's death;  the ideology that has driven the revolution since 1979 lives on.